Six classic design guides that are as essential as they are timeless

Hailed as the “Dean of American Decorating,” Baltimore-born Baldwin (1903–83) set the standard for Yankee chic in the 1960s, popularizing everything from high-gloss chocolate-brown walls to Matisse-bright chintzes to the enduring slipper chair that bears his name. He also produced one of the 20th century’s finest decorating manuals, a big, colorful, intelligent work that reads like an intimate conversation over a glass or two of wine. The pages percolate with timeless tips and sweeping if inarguable pronouncements: “Every rug should have a border of some sort,” for example. It’s impossible not to be swept up in Baldwin’s personal enthusiasms, whether for laminate surfaces or printed cottons.

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Decoration for the Small Home by Derek PatmoreThe Falcon Press, 1948

Patmore was one of a handful of young interior decorators shaping British rooms in the middle of the 20th century, though some of his style training came from a stint at B. Altman & Co., the New York City department store. Among his slender how-to publications was this charming exploration of how to live well in restricted square footage and on a tight budget. Patmore (1908–72) was especially sensitive to the latter condition, since England was laboring under the effects of postwar rationing at the time of the book’s publication, though he brightly notes, “present-day austerity does not compel us to abandon all attempts at preserving good taste and design in our homes.” Among his recommendations are circular dining tables, which do not take up as much space as their square and rectangular brethren, and painting all connecting halls the same color to establish unity and a sense of spaciousness.

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Colour and Interior Decoration by Basil IonidesCountry Life Ltd., 1926

No other interior designer, to my knowledge, has ever suggested not making any decorating decision while tired. Ionides did, and it is just one of the admonitions that makes this book a keeper. Of Greek descent and British fortune, Ionides (1884–1950) is known today, if at all, for the 1929 interiors of London’s shimmering Savoy Theatre. He also conjured enormously subtle domestic color schemes that take into account a multitude of unexpected variables, including the tinted light that one color reflects onto its neighbors. Nine of the book’s 15 chapters are devoted to the character and use of individual hues, beginning with brown (he endearingly describes mahogany as a “hot brown”) and ending with red (“most difficult to use without gloom”). My favorite illustration is a W.E.B. Ranken watercolor of a dark-blue paneled dining room at Ionides’s country house, where the dead-white ceiling never looked as harsh as it sounded, Ionides wrote, “because inside the dove-grey damask curtains hang taffeta sun curtains of bright pink, which colour is reflected on to the ceiling and the high lights of the panel moldings.” The chapters also offer detailed color combinations confected for a variety of architectural details, situations (town or country), and exposures.

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The House in Good Tasteby Elsie de WolfeRizzoli, 2004

De Wolfe’s decorating manual, first published in 1914, is an engagingly effervescent, populist recycling of many lessons set forth in Wharton and Codman’s stuffier Decoration of Houses. A best-dressed actress who became the Chintz Lady of interior decoration, de Wolfe (1865–1950) casts her gimlet eye from one end of the house to the other, addressing in flirtatious but sensible prose—her ghostwriter was future grande dame decorator Ruby Ross Wood—the benefits of daybeds, broad window sills, and painted furniture, as well as her preference for sturdy reproductions over “feeble originals.” Especially encouraging is one typically optimistic observation: “There never was a house so bad that it couldn’t be made over into something worthwhile.”

An Indiana-born tastemaker who left his stamp everywhere from the White House to the American Academy in Rome, Hampton (1940–98) knew almost everything there was to know about the history of interior design. That knowledge, coupled with his personal popularity, led him to produce monthly columns for House & Garden for a few years. Those easygoing but information-packed essays (subjects include the color green, small rooms, porches, and table settings) are compiled into one beautifully designed, perfectly sized volume, which is illustrated with Hampton’s own captivating watercolors of rooms he decorated, visited, and admired. The book has a permanent place on my bedside table—along with a stack of the latest Nordic murder mysteries.

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Living with Design by David HicksLittlehampton Book Services Ltd., 1979

Hicks dominated the international decorating world in the 1960s and ’70s, as much for his matinee-idol good looks and choleric temper as for his unequivocal interiors. (He was also married to a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, which certainly kept his profile high.) Colors were usually bright, contrasts were typically bold, and patterns were crisp, geometric, and often thrillingly brash. Many of Hicks’s best interiors show up in this book, the sixth in a series of brusquely opinionated style guides that offer his singularly assertive takes on lighting, front doors, flower arrangements, even containers of pencils. (They should always be the same color, he decreed, and always sharpened.) “I do not believe that my ideas have become out of date,” Hicks confidently writes, and frankly, given the evidence these many years later, it’s hard to disagree.